This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Syria gathers three cities recording a layered religious history running from a Bronze Age archive that shaped how scholars read the Hebrew Bible to the capital of an Islamic caliphate.
Ugarit, the mound of Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, was excavated from 1929 and yielded archives written in an alphabetic cuneiform script that preserve the Baal cycle and other Canaanite religious texts. Those tablets changed the study of the Hebrew Bible by supplying the West Semitic religious vocabulary and poetic forms its writers worked with and against; the city was destroyed around 1200 BCE and never resettled.
Damascus is where Christian tradition places the conversion of Paul on the road into the city, and where the Umayyad caliphate made its capital in 661. Its Umayyad Mosque, built in the early eighth century on a site that had held a temple of Hadad, then of Jupiter, then a church of John the Baptist, still contains a shrine venerated as holding the Baptist's head, and the city has long been an important destination of Shia pilgrimage, particularly to the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab on its southern edge.
Aleppo is one of the longest continuously inhabited cities in the world, its citadel standing over a temple of the storm god Hadad used in the second millennium BCE. Its Great Mosque, its churches of several eastern rites and its long established Jewish quarter reflect the same layering: the Aleppo Codex, the most authoritative manuscript of the Masoretic Hebrew Bible, was kept in the city's synagogue from the fourteenth century until riots in 1947, after which the surviving portion reached Jerusalem. Much of the old city was destroyed in the fighting between 2012 and 2016.